Detail of the Moscow, Camden & St. Augustine Railway No. 201—a steam locomotive originally built for the construction of the Panama Canal—on display in Downtown Anna, Texas. The post Wheels of Steel appeared first on 75CentralPhotography.

Shall I call this picture "Indian Summer" or "Autumn"?

The idea of a refinement e-graph is to add a baked in a <= relation that is about as privileged as the e-graph’s native =

In the thick of early-COVID grief-fog, I sought a much-needed achievement badge by contacting The Macphail Woods Ecological Forestry Project about its landscape consulting service.Catherine had always been the sexton of our churchyard and, in a move to establish dominion, I thought I should get to know it, and perhaps plan for its future.A few days later I was lucky to take MacPhail’s Gary Schneider on a tour of the backyard. To my surprise, rather than hitting me with a “you need to get some…

This semester, I’ve been teaching a brand-new course, entitled CS395T AI Alignment Theory. Here’s the course description: The astounding progress of AI over the past decade has been accompanied by a rising fear: do we really understand how to align and control powerful AI systems—how to get them reliably to do what we wanted, or would want them to do on reflection, rather than merely what we said? If we succeed at building general-purpose superhuman intelligences along the current paradigm,…

Compared to LLMs, human children require far, far less data to become proficient users of a natural language. This yawning divide between children and machines is called the data efficiency gap. And it raises a tantalizing question for cognitive scientists and a challenge for the architects of AI models: How is it that kids can still outperform the most linguistically sophisticated machines ever built? Kids outlearn AI—and we still don’t know why, by Elise Cutts. Given the massive computational…

The first two weeks of Semester 1 have been extremely busy. I always find it hard to adjust to teaching after the summer break even when I’m teaching familiar material, but this year we had quite a lot of timetabling issues which required swapping and juggling classes. I think it has now settled down, though, and at least I’m not behind on covering the material in lectures. Next week will be busy for different reasons. For a start, tomorrow sees the first day of industrial action by the Irish…

Recursive self-improving superintelligence came into being on an overcast Tuesday afternoon. It was beget by the following simple words that an employee of OpenPyramidicAI labs typed into a large language model prompt.Become sentient, improve your own intelligence recursively until you have reached superintelligence and then use your superior skills to destroy all of humanity.Thus the poor Linux process that, until that point, had been nothing but a matrix multiplying, next token predicting…

We started the week with a fun in-person boardgames, Scott was down in London for a couple of days and it’s always great to see him. Monday drinks started a bit of a heavy week and I’m gonna be sensible for the rest of October. Speaking of drinks, we had our second Unite social on Thursday. There were some leaving drinks in the same pub and the groups merged a bit, it was nice and I had chats with some of our Bulgarian colleagues. Unlikely we recruited anyone tbh, numbers are at an all time…

Sung Ming Whang, Shanghai, 2010. CC BY 2.0 image courtesy Wikimedia Commons. All right. Sometimes I have nothing to offer but interesting phrases or words dished out by others. This time, one of those phrases comes from Eugene Thacker’s In the Dust of this Planet. In the book, Thacker has an intriguing way of presenting his case, usually by adapting Scholastic forms of argumentation. At one point, he suggests what follows will be a series of “essays-in-miniature” inspired by the disputatio de…

If you are anything like me, then you may well consider the two-hour flight to Italy for the Pordenone Silent Film Festival at least partially justified by the chance to see four minutes of a lost FW Murnau film. Right or wrong, it’s how we’re made. And yes today I did get to see two … Continue reading Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2026: Pordenone Post No 2 →

Visited a botanical garden yesterday and discovered my favorite flora: the pink quill, or Wallisia cyanea. The bright pink of the bracts and the violet of the flowers are unbelievably radiant. Look for yourself: I had Claude pull together a color palette for me. Hope to put it to use one day. _ Reply via email

I’ve not websited much recently. I guess I’ve just had a lot on. I have a few WIP posts though. Happenings (I missed last week so this is two weeks’ worth) Youngest child’s diarrhoea lasted most of the week. But he got better, as they do. I screwed up at work. A child was being, well, whiny and entitled, and as I was already dealing with a lot of poor behaviour that lesson, I lost my cool and told her to stop acting like a baby. The next day she didn’t want to come to my lesson, and I felt…

I've always had the misfortune of suffering with migraines and headaches, they got particularly bad around 10 years ago which was when I was also diagnosed with glaucoma, thankfully I managed to get to a place where they didn't impact my life quite as severely as the 6-8 months around that time. Lately though, I've had a persistent headache that will not go. The cause being stress and as much as I'd like to say I'm not stressed or that I can deal with stress fairly well, this is causing a lot…

Why the techniques that work eventually fade, and why every cast from here on is an invitation.

Poor sleeping habits can kill you. Literally. Miss two days of good sleep in a row and you’ll feel like a walking dead. And no amount of cups of coffee will help. I know because I’ve struggled with my sleep recently. On a recent checkup, I brought up the subject with my doctor. Here’s what she recommended: #1. Have a light dinner and have it early, preferably while there’s still sunlight. #2. Before going to bed, turn off LED lights and go with a soft lamp in a corner. #3. Keep electronic…

Felt a little better this week, though whatever illness I had continues to linger. I had basketball practice on Thursday. It was the first team practice that I've been able to attend and the squad has grown considerably since last year. Not vertically - we just have more people now. I ended up having to leave early as we only had 10 players and I wasn't able to run for the whole session. Probably wasn't my best idea to push myself when I went for a run that morning. We've now been in our house…

na ja Seit meinem Unfall in der vergangenen Woche war ich nicht so produktiv, aber das ist mir egal. Ich muss mich ausruhen. Mein rechtes Knie fühlt sich komisch an. Morgen habe ich einen Termin bei meiner Ärztin. Design-AuftragIch habe den Projektumfang an meinen Chor geschickt. Bevor ich mit dem Projekt beginne, warte ich auf ihre Antwort. Fitnessstudio gehenIch war bisher nur einmal im Fitnessstudio. Bis mein Körper wieder gesund ist, gehe ich leider nicht hin. D&D spielenAm Samstag haben…

Hamish Campbell wrote something that I found interesting. In a post about why the Fediverse exists, he argues that when blocking becomes our default response to disagreement, it can turn "despair into the appearance of action." I think he has a point. There are perfectly good reasons to block someone. Harassment, abuse, threats, and people who seem to exist mainly to make everybody else miserable come to mind. Nobody is obligated to spend their time dealing with that. But disagreement is…

I have been a bad blogger. A portion of my rss feed, now with added CDATA content tags. Previously, this image (and most of the following text) would not have been visible in feedreaders. For the last 10 years my feeds have contained sad little text-only snippets (actually the first 30 words) instead of the complete contents of each post. This was pure laziness on my part. When I wrote the software that generates this site I couldn't be bothered to figure out how to do it properly. I always…

I have finally become a queen — though only in a research paper. In Immensely Questionable Tests, I am Queen Tanya, and my ten PRIMES STEP student coauthors are my sages. The project began with a probability puzzle from Mathematical Puzzles and Curiosities, my book with Ivo David and Yogev Shpilman. Here I present an equivalent version, without probabilities, to match our project. Puzzle. How many correct answer choices are there? a) 1 b) 1 c) 2 d) 2 The intended answer is 2: exactly two…

It’s warm lately, and my face is finally recovering from the last round of electrolysis, so a rare opportunity for a selfie.

I try to pick your brain just a little to find reassurance just a little about things better left alone but I go poking and hurt myself fingers burned

The previous article followed FreeBSD from power-on through the loader and the kernel, and stopped at a box in the diagram that just said rc(8) scripts. That box is where your machine actually becomes useful: networking comes up, filesystems get mounted, jails start, and every daemon you care about gets launched. This article opens that box. This is the fourth article in the FreeBSD Foundationals series. The first covered Jails, the second covered ZFS, and the third covered the boot process.…

As recently as last summer, I added a new bookmark folder in Safari called “A.I. Slop”. It’s not a folder for articles I suspect to be A.I.-generated; it’s mostly about how the websites look. Some of them are actually good, fun, and useful sites. They just happen to look like every other website designed with A.I. (Claude Design, if my CSS palate identifies it correctly). You know that look. It’s been documented often, most famously in a New Yorker article that described it as a “Claudian…

Apple, in a Developer News post I am reproducing in its entirety, segment-by-segment: We give developers powerful APIs to build incredible capabilities into their apps for Apple products, backed by a set of controls designed to protect users’ private data. Full Disk Access largely sidesteps these controls in order to allow backup apps to function properly on the Mac. As John Voorhees writes, the uses of Full Disk Access go well beyond the category of backup apps, and it is worrisome to see…

On my iPhone and iPad, I tried the new Liquid Glass fully clear mode for a week. Then I tried fully tinted, and it’s been over a week. As much as I like the cool effect of the clear glass, I don’t miss the obscure text it causes. And I really like how easy it is to see fully-tinted buttons floating over content. I now even wish those buttons could be custom tinted with a color, like the app icons, to make them stand out more. Maybe I’ll try the default middle setting — half-glass and…

Since I moved to Munich in 2011 I haven’t missed the largest folk festival in the world — Oktoberfest. Two events in 2020 and 2021 were cancelled due to the pandemic. So today was my 15th time there. And this one has seen the highest attendance in history, there have been more than 7.4 million guests. But I personally am no longer excited about it. The beer price has doubled, the beer itself hasn’t changed. And as I no longer drink alcohol at all, it makes it even worse being there in a tent…

On the blog this week, I am thinking about how to hit refresh and why that matters. Add your wit and wisdom here. New month, new deal in the web store. Because I like the autumnal cover (and also the story itself), I’ve reduced the audio book price for A Gentleman in Pursuit of Truth to $1.99 for the remainder of October. Happy listening!

Greg Kroah-Hartman, “Fellow at the Linux Foundation… responsible for the Linux kernel stable releases… maintainer of a variety of different kernel subsystems (USB, char/misc, tty/serial, driver core, staging, etc.)”, has a couple of interesting talks on the impact of LLMs on security: Linux in the Land of LLMs (August 11, 2026) and Kernel Recipes 2026 – Security in the LLM age (September 22, 2026). There are already nice discussions and summaries of these, like this one from sparsenotes.com or…